Review: Viet Thanh Nyugen

Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and the sequel

Novels

I struggled to read the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer (2015) and its sequel, The Committed (2021). They were not the most pleasant read, but I was compelled to read them.

Admittedly, I have something of a Vietnam fetish. It started after I traveled to Vietnam as a tourist in 2018, and that evoked a curiosity and memories about this country that won their war against the Americans. I was a teenager when boys I knew went off to fight. I corresponded with friends, who I had hung around with from my village (I grew up in Guam). I was in college in California when there was a mass evacuation of Vietnamese refugees who were escaping the communist regime, so I missed that firsthand experience of that time in Guam. When I heard that a book by a Vietnamese author, Nguyen, had won a Pulitzer, I had to read it.

I had found another book of his, The Refugees, at my neighborhood used book store, so I read that first. The style of this collection of short stories, was more familiar to me — deep, personal stories that elucidated the human experience in unique ways. But these two — The Sympathizer and The Committed, were difficult. I mean, his use of unusual (dollar words) vocabulary alone, stopped the flow of reading for me many times. But I kept pushing…